List of ships of the United States Army

Section 3062, Title 10, U.S. Code, states that the Army includes "land combat and service forces and such aviation and water transport as may be organic therein."

After the war the Army's fleet began to resume its peacetime role and even regain the old colors of gray hulls, white deck houses and buff trimming, masts and booms with the red, white and blue stack rings.

[7] Some of these ships, acquired and operating under United States Army Services of Supply, Southwest Pacific Area (USASOS SWPA), achieved some notability in military history in daring voyages to resupply the forces cut off in the Philippines from either Australia or the already collapsing Dutch East Indies.

[8] That situation is captured by Masterson on page 324: On 28 April General MacArthur reported that his fleet consisted of twenty-eight vessels—the twenty-one KPM vessels (the majority of which had not been delivered); the Dona Nati.

The Admiral Halstead, the Coast Farmer, and the MS Sea Witch, chartered by WSA; and the Anhui, the Yochow and the Hanyang, believed to be chartered by the British Ministry of War Transport (BMWT) for the U.S. Army, though no official information concerning their status had been received.

[7]Three of those vessels, Coast Farmer, Dona Nati and Anhui, out of a number sent, managed to run the Japanese blockade of the Philippines and deliver supplies.

Digital photographs[11] of a few of these vessels in Army service are provided at the Naval History and Heritage Command.

The ships were fitted with machine tools, cranes, and all the equipment necessary for a machine shop, including welding, radiator, tank, wood, patterns, blue print, electrical, fabric and dope, paint, air-conditioned instrument and camera shops, radio, battery, propeller, tires and fuel cells, armament and turrets, plating, radar, carburetor, and turbo-super-charger.

They were supplied with a large inventory of steel, sheet metal, lumber, aluminum, and other materials to manufacture needed parts.

Each ship was also provided with two motor launches and two DUKWs or "ducks," amphibious trucks for carrying parts too heavy for the helicopters.

[16][17] The ships were designated as Aircraft Repair Units, Floating (ARUs) and operated by the Army Transport Service, all of whose officers and men were merchant mariners.

The ships provided mobile depot support for B-29 Superfortress and P-51 Mustangs based on Guam, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa beginning in December 1944.

They were also fitted with landing platforms to accommodate four R-4 helicopters, creating the first seagoing helicopter-equipped ships, and provided medical evacuation of combat casualties in both the Philippines and Okinawa.

[1][7] Houston, which had first served in the Aleutians, was declared surplus while at Mariveles, Philippines and turned over to the Foreign Liquidation Commission in February 1946, reverted to U. S. Army Forces, Western Pacific (AFWESPAC) in April 1946, but was not used as a repair ship after being declared surplus.

Seven cargo vessels were converted to spare parts depot ships to facilitate the maintenance of military equipment in oversea areas.

The 20 dry cargo barges originally intended for bauxite were taken by the Army and 17 were used in the southwest Pacific for storehouses.

Of the 24 steam cargo concrete vessels, 17 were converted by the Army into floating storehouses, 5 were used by the Army as training ships and 2 found an honorable end when sunk to form part of the breakwater protecting the American landing in Normandy at Omaha beach.A.

D. Kahn, "Concrete Ship and Barge Program, 1941-1944"Ships for victory: a history of shipbuilding under the U.S. Maritime Commission in World War II[28]The Army had its own program for small boat construction and directly procured vessels and water craft that were under 200 feet or under 1,000 gross tons.

[35] Army F-ships (100-dwt) were little freighters built on the lines of a Dutch wooden shoe and had a capacity of about 100 tons with a maximum speed of 8 knots.

[44][45][46] The Army had a history of submarine cable work by the time of World War II operations, dating back to the 1899-1900 period.

[52] The Army Signal Corps used a number of cable ships for that work including Burnside, Romulus, Liscum, Dellwood and two vessels intimately associated with the Coast Artillery Corps controlled mine work at the coastal fortifications; Cyrus W. Field and Joseph Henry.

[51] The Army entered the field of undersea cable work in connecting the military installations in the Philippine Islands.

[51] The transport Hooker was fitted as a cable ship for Philippine service arriving in Manila from New York 26 June 1899.

They were seagoing diesel-electric hydraulic dredging vessels, normally functioning under the Army Corps of Engineers control, and used for maintaining and improving the coastal and harbor channels around the U.S.

Among those in the 1918 register were Major L'Enfant, a steamer that served on the Potomac and burned in Baltimore on 3 December 1919[131][132][133] and General Meigs, a Quartermaster Corps passenger and freight steamer built in 1892 by John H. Dialogue & Son, Camden New Jersey, and serving in the early 20th century with a name given to much larger ships later.

[131][134] A class of small coastal and inter-island freighters during World War II were first designated "FP" for "freight and passenger" with early acquisitions being a variety of commercial hulls.

Essentially all maritime commercial cargo and passenger type vessels were under strict control of WSA under Executive Order No.

In addition to these there were a variety of small towing craft, numbering in thousands, termed motor towing launches (MTL), sometimes overlapping the STs in length, and marine tractors of 40'and less length, some with the colorful name of "Sea Mules" with dimensions of 40 x 13 x 8 and two Chrysler gasoline engines.

[1][155] A construction program in Australia built a number of tugs for the Southwest Pacific Area in both LT and ST size.

Only the first eight World War II-era LT numbered tugs built by Jakobson Shipyard, Oyster Bay New York, were given names during construction.

Brooklyn Army Base , New York, between the wars.
Aerial photograph of piers at headquarters and at U.S. Naval Repair Base during loading operations showing nine Army transport ships docked at the commercial wharfs at San Diego, California. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Philippine registered Dona Nati , part of "General MacArthur's fleet into 1942," one of three ships to successfully run the Japanese blockade of the Philippines.
The Liberty ship Rebecca Lukens was converted into a floating machine shop, repair, and maintenance depot and rechristened as the Maj Gen Herbert A Dargue .
Cable ship Burnside in Ketchikan , Alaska , June 1911.
U.S. Army Cable Ship Albert J. Myer (ca 1960).
USAMP Major Samuel Ringgold , built in 1904. (National Archives and Records Administration)
U.S. Army Cargo Vessel FP-343 ("FP" later changed to "FS"), a "Design 381" (Vessel, Supply, Diesel, Steel, 177'), was later to become Navy's T-AKL-34 .
Two of the fifteen Design 342, 148' wooden vessels went to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Here Penguin II , ex FS-246 , is at anchor in the Bering Sea off the Pribilof Islands in 1961.
U.S. Army Cargo Vessel FP-344 (redesignated FS-344 ). Transferred to the Navy in 1966, she became USS Pueblo (AGER-2) .
U.S. Army LT-454 , a 143-foot diesel electric ocean-going tug of a type used extensively in theaters of operations. ( United States Army In World War II – The Technical Services – The Transportation Corps: Movements, Training, And Supply , p.474.)
The Paul P. Hastings tugboat (ex U.S. Army LT-814 ) in China Basin, San Francisco in 1982. At this time she was the last of the Santa Fe Railroad tugs still in service.
U.S. Army LT–1960 Lindis Lane at Field Support Battalion-Hythe, England
U.S. Army ST-891, an 85-foot (Design 327D) diesel small tug. ( United States Army In World War II-The Technical Services-The Transportation Corps: Movements, Training, And Supply , p.487.)